Word: fibula
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...catalog of trauma turned out to be a long one. Below the right knee, the tibia and fibula shattered into half a dozen pieces. The right femur broken, the ball joint at the hip damaged. The elbow of the right arm crushed. Several ribs snapped, their sharp ends driven into the lungs. Collarbone and sternum busted. What saved me was the merest fluke: apart from punctured lungs, a few picturesque cuts and some bruising to my liver and heart, the damage was all skeletal, not soft tissue. My brain was intact; ditto my eyes, spine, guts and genitals. It could...
...right leg, with its multiple fractures, in a fiendish-looking contraption called an Ilizarov frame: three concentric rings enclosed the leg, and from each of them sprouted an array of metal spikes that went through the flesh and screwed into the pieces of my tibia and fibula, holding them rigidly in position so they could reknit. I would be cursing this gadget for two months...
Although Kennedy said she originally feared that Sturdy may have fractured her fibula, X-rays indicated that there were no broken bones. Sturdy has a severe ankle sprain with at least partially torn ligaments and possibly fully severed ligaments--her ankle is still too swollen for X-rays to indicate the full extent of the ligament damage...
Mononychus may be the discovery of a lifetime. The turkey-size predator, ! with its mouthful of sharp teeth and long tail, looked quite similar to the theropods. Even so, says paleontologist Mark Norell, it shares a number of features with modern birds. "In Archaeopteryx, for example," he explains, "the fibula ((the thin bone in the leg)) touches the ankle. In birds that doesn't happen, and the same is true of Mononychus. Birds have a keeled sternum ((or breastbone)), where the flight muscles attach. Mononychus also had a keeled sternum." Some of Mononychus' wristbones were fused together, which is another...